An ongoing review of politics and culture

I try to avoid plugging things I write, but I’ve decided that this is silly. I am lame. I accept it. So I too will engage in self-promotion. E.g., hey fools! Buy the book I wrote with Ross! It’s sweet!

But I just had to mention that I have a piece in the new issue of The Spectator. As some of you know, I follow British politics pretty closely, and I’ve been reading The Spectator for years. It’s a real honor to appear in its pages. I’ve written a fairly harsh reality check for Republicans, one that implicitly calls for some degree of Cameronization of the GOP, and it touches on some themes I’ve addressed here. I make a few claims you might consider overbroad (among them that American exceptionalism is “all but dead”), but I think it holds up. See for yourself. And do give some thought to reading the rest of the issue. We have a lot to learn from our British counterparts, in journalism as in partisan politics. The Spectator is, without fail, free-wheeling and fun, and unfailingly intelligent about Labour’s travails — often in a sympathetic vein.

I also had the great pleasure of working with Jonathan Shainin, who is someone I’ve been hearing about for years, on a piece that just appeared in The National, a new newspaper) based in oil-rich Abu Dhabi. It’s a perhaps too-breezy recounting of the Clinton years in the broad sweep of contemporary history, and it posits that the defining element of the Clinton era was the positively Victorian self-confidence of America’s elite. I argue, briefly, that Obama represents what George W. Bush claimed to represent: a turn towards humility and a sense of limits, which is to say a more chastened American elite. I kind of hope that’s true.

Leave a Reply

Congrats on the piece – and very much so agreed on the Cameronization of the GOP. Modernizing the party is necessary. A number of hard-right conservatives I’ve spoken too think that “modernization” is a code word for “becoming big government social liberals”, or in other words, Democrats. My take is that this is completely off base – that to modernize doesn’t mean to change the principles we stand for, it’s to re-examine how those principles are best applied to create positive outcomes. Everyone always wants to revive Reagan without realizing that we can’t keep living in the 80s. Not to say we jettison the principles – on the contrary, we find a way to help people see small government and individual responsibility as relevant to their lives in the 21st century.

Take a look at this piece from Roll Call that Dave Winston put together last year…
http://www.rollcall.com/issues/53_43/winston/20473-1.html?type=printer_friendly